I don't have to pound on that thick skull of yours and make big speeches as to what this mission means to us. I think you know. If... you do good, it means the lives of several thousand men, so do good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth li...es in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Paul de Bursac: You don't think much of me, Captain Morgan. You're wondering why they have chosen me for this mission. I wonder to...o. As you know, I am not a brave man. On the contrary, I'm always frightened. I wish I could borrow your nature for awhile, Captain. When you meet danger, you never think of anything except how you will circumvent it. The word failure does not even exist for you. While I, I think always, suppose I fail and that I am frightened.Harry Morgan: Yeah, I can easily see how it wouldn't take much courage to get a notorious patriot off Devils' Island. But uh, but just for professional reasons, I'd like to know how you're going to do it.Paul de Bursac: We will find a way. It might fail, and if it does and I'm, I'm still alive, I will try to pass on my information, my mission, to someone else, perhaps to a better man who does not fail. Because there is always someone else. That is the mistake the Germans always make with people they try to destroy. There will be always someone else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another,... can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

No doubt for the average man nationalism is no more than one of the faiths that live together in actual if illogical partnership i...n his heart and mind (illogical in the sense that some of these faiths, say Christianity and national patriotism, may have mutually incompatible ethical ideals). Yet it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which for many modern Western men the worship of the nation-state occupies a major part of their conscious relations with groups outside the family.... The ritual surrounding the flag, patriotic hymns, the reverent reading of patriotic texts, the glorification of national heroes (saints), the insistence on the nation's mission, the nation's basic consonance with the scheme of the universe--all of this is so familiar to most of us that unless we are internationalist crusaders in favor of a world-state or some other proposed means for securing universal peace we never even notice it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A woman cannot do the thing she ought,Which means whatever perfect thing she can,...In life, in art, in science, but she fearsTo let the perfect action take her partAnd rest there: she must prove what she can doBefore she does it,--prate of woman's rights,Of woman's mission, woman's function, tillThe men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,"A woman's function plainly is ... to talk."Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of s...imple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission.If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth. Divine Providence has a mission for her children to fulfill; though a mi...ssion unrecognized by political economists. There is ever a moral balance preserved in the universe, like the vibrations of the pendulum. The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »